And She Was
Authors: Alison Gaylin
ALISON GAYLIN
and she was
A NOVEL OF SUSPENSE
Dedication
For my beloved dad Bob Sloane
and favorite aunt Myrna Lebov,
alive forever in my heart—and memory.
Contents
An Excerpt from
And She Was
sequel
M
any thanks to my wonderful agent Deborah Schneider, as well as everyone at HarperCollins—especially the great Lyssa Keusch and Wendy Lee.
For their law enforcement/investigation expertise—and patience with stupid questions—Lee Lofland, Gisele Fraseur, City Island expert Marcelle Harrison, Joel Ludlow, Carol Gray, and Sergeant Josh Moulin, Commander of the Southern Oregon High Tech Crimes Task Force.
For their support, writing advice, and all-around awesomeness throughout all phases of this book—Abigail Thomas, Karen E. Olson, Jeff Shelby, Lori Armstrong, Megan Abbott, Jason Starr, Paul Leone, Claudette Covey, Bar Scott, Rik Fairlie, Ann Patty, Austin Metz, James Conrad, artist/manga expert Hali Barthel . . . plus anyone not mentioned who should be. You know who you are. This is the one and only time I wish I had Brenna’s memory.
Finally, thanks goes out to my dear mom Beverly Sloane, first-rate in-laws Sheldon and Marilyn Gaylin—and, most of all, Marissa and Mike. I love you guys.
September 20, 2009
C
arol Wentz’s life now had a “before” and an “after.” She’d never thought of it that way, but the passage of time brings perspective, and ten years later, Carol could see it—the moment before she made the Neff girl disappear and the moment after.
A clear, clean mark.
For forty-one years, Carol’s life had moved from day to day with no real marks at all—no children, a marriage that Carol had eased into gradually, with a whimper of a city hall wedding that took place on a Wednesday at lunch hour and for health insurance reasons, after she and Nelson had been living together for almost a decade. She supposed she could track time before and after Nelson—her single years versus her conjoined ones—but the truth was, before Nelson wasn’t really all that different from after Nelson, each day stretching out and ending with Carol still the same old Carol—the Carol she’d been in grade school, reedy and knock-kneed and mostly alone.
But then Labor Day, 1998, happened and everything was different. Carol was different. Well, she supposed she’d always been different—she’d just never known it before. How would she have described herself in book club?
An unlikable character. Too weak and petty. I don’t believe her motivations. The girl was only six, after all
. . .
Carol didn’t like to think about it, the actual day. But there was a long list of things that Carol didn’t like to do—cooking the turkey for her church’s Thanksgiving dinner, feeding her neighbors’ cats when they were out of town, jump-starting their cars or picking their kids up from school on a moment’s notice—yet she did all those things anyway, and without complaint. Carol didn’t used to be like that. Before she made the Neff girl go, she did her part for others by staying out of their way. But now she was a helper, a
go-to gal
, and everyone on her block—even Nelson—treated her as if this was nothing new. As if it had always been a defining quality of Carol’s, when really, it was just part of her penance. A symptom of “after.”
T
he day, the important part of it, began with the Neff girl approaching Carol at Theresa and Mark Koppelson’s barbecue. Carol had been alone. The last she’d seen of Nelson, he’d been speaking to the girl’s mother, Lydia, who was helping out with the cooking. “You look incredible,” he had said.
Incredible
, as if Nelson hadn’t seen Lydia Neff in years and she was wearing something other than jeans and an apron smeared with barbecue sauce.
Nelson and Lydia hadn’t noticed Carol, and so she’d been able to step away and feign searching for the bathroom—another one of those times when she felt so intensely awkward, as if someone were holding a giant magnifying glass to her body, amplifying every gesture.
Carol had just pushed through the kitchen door when she felt the tap on her leg. She stopped, and saw Lydia Neff’s daughter, whose first name was Iris, staring up at her with those eyes, her mother’s black eyes, slick and hard and knowing. Carol’s jaw tensed up. Her scalp tingled. She thought of that word again.
Incredible
.
“What do you want, Iris?”
“Juice box.” No “please,” but she hadn’t been rude. Actually, Iris Neff had said it meekly, if Carol’s memory was to be trusted. And so Carol had made for the red ice chest that Theresa Koppelson had placed next to her refrigerator. The sign on it read “Drinks for Kids.” Carol had lifted the lid and gazed at the bright little boxes littering the cans of Sprite and orange soda like confetti, all of them bearing pictures of happy cartoon fruit. Carol wasn’t familiar with the brand. Of course, she wasn’t a mother and hardly ever entertained memories of her own childhood, and so they all confused her, these youth-aimed products. Why did children need to drink juice from a box, anyway? What was the appeal of fruit with eyes?
She’d yanked one of the boxes out of the cooler—green, with a smiling, bucktoothed apple on the label.
“Here you go,” she said, handing it to Iris.
The girl scrunched up her face.
“What?”
“This is apple juice,” Iris said. “I like orange pineapple.”
Carol’s gaze moved from the girl’s face to the kitchen door, the small window affording a view of Lydia Neff’s shiny black hair and Nelson, leaning in close, as if to hear her better . . .
“Orange pineapple,” Iris said again.
“I am not your
mother
. Get it
yourself
.”
The black eyes widened.
Carol’s skin heated up. Her voice hung in the air like an odor.
What am I?
she thought.
What am I turning into?
For some reason, this made her angry with Iris, which, in turn, shamed her even more. “I’m . . . I . . . I’ll get the juice for you.”
But by the time she’d gone back to the ice chest and pulled out a new juice box—this one with a winking pineapple in a baseball cap and a doll-faced female orange—the little girl was gone.
C
arol stared at the stack of papers in her hand—another symptom of “after,” but this one more painful. Carol had built a fire—her first fire of the fall—and she nearly threw the papers in, just for the pleasure of watching them turn to black dust. It would have been better than reading them, that was for sure.
Why read nothing?
In five years of searching for a girl that wouldn’t be found, she’d at least learned that much.
Carol could never burn the papers, though. And so she moved over to the closet near the bookshelves—Carol’s crafts closet as far as Nelson was concerned—and slid out the small black trunk she kept under her knitting bags. She threw back the lid and removed the layer of bright fabric scraps and squares sewn together in festive clusters, removed the spools of thread and pattern books and the wooden needle box (all remnants of the quilting phase she’d gone through fifteen years ago). Then she removed the piece of cardboard she’d cut to fit the floor of the box, and she placed the stack of papers in. Placed it in without reading it, on top of all the other stacks of papers she never should have read, repositioned the cardboard, and arranged everything back on top until it was her quilting supply box again.
These new papers had come from Mr. Klavel—a ferrety man with a basement office in neighboring Mount Temple, a large, sweaty forehead, and breath so foul that it almost felt intentional. Mr. Klavel, latest in a line of cheap private investigators Carol had hired in secret, and possibly the least sensitive man she’d ever met.
The fruits of my search
, he had said as he handed Carol the ten-year-old police files, the photocopy of Iris’s first grade class picture, and phone call transcripts and addresses of known pedophiles living within a twenty-mile radius of Carol’s home in Tarry Ridge, New York, a decade ago.
All rotten
. Carol still couldn’t believe he’d said that.
After Carol had gotten the trunk closed and everything back in the closet, she stood staring at the door, Mr. Klavel’s words still ringing in her head.
“You built a fire?” Nelson said.
Carol jumped. Nelson had a way of sneaking up on her. It wasn’t that he had any interest in spying on his wife. Nelson rarely even asked her questions and when he did, it seemed more out of habit than curiosity. It was simply the way Nelson moved—as if he didn’t want to disturb the carpet by putting too much weight on it.